Spark and tether, p.24
Spark and Tether, page 24
Impatient, Sacheri started to protest, but Jin was afraid, and he could soothe that. They would see sense; it was one of the things they were best at. So he explained about the packet from the fai, and the debris scan report he couldn’t read, and how when he combined them, he had another syn’s memories in his. He was answering her prayers.
“Her prayers,” Jin said flatly.
“Neither of us are from spiritual traditions,” Sacheri said. “But many of the early synchronists were. They saw integration as a sort of melding with their entities. It’s not a warning sign of fanaticism. Skysiders have religions, sometimes, yeah? So do syns.”
Jin let out a long exhale. Their hands were clenched hard enough to turn their knuckles white, and Sacheri could see nothing but conflict in their eyes.
He really wished Paradis was a part of the conversation. She was much better at persuasion. “This is a lot to take in, and I’ve had days to consider it,” Sacheri said. “Let’s talk more later.”
“You’re thinking of investigating this on your own,” they said.
“I have been investigating this on my own,” he said.
Jin turned frighteningly pale. “How long?”
“Since we got here.”
Jin swore and covered their face with their hands. “That’s why you joined I&R.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know how much risk—”
“Compared to what has already happened?”
“I couldn’t even—” Jin’s lips moved, but they said nothing more.
Sacheri’s heart sank, and he was suddenly sure there was no more conversation to be had. He could not wait any longer, and Jin could not go. He looked away, willing himself not to cry. Not like this.
Jin dropped their hands to their lap. He couldn’t read their expression at all.
“We can talk about it later.” Sacheri smiled and took their hands as he stood. “Cord made a new dip for that bread you like so much. Let’s get dinner there.”
The next round of the conversation did not go better.
“No. Absolutely no,” Jin said.
Sacheri took a deep breath. He was failing to make clear how important his next steps could be. “I don’t know how many options I have.”
“Not that one,” Jin said. They had been stretched against the back of the chair, but as soon as Sacheri had revealed his plan, they straightened and moved forward, elbows on knees, brow furrowed.
“We know she knows things we don’t. We know she has sources we don’t.”
“And what makes you think Adda will hand them to you now, after all that time when she didn’t?”
“She wants whatever answers she was looking for, doesn’t she?”
“And she’ll continue to bring others to harm in the process,” Jin said. “Do you know how many there have been?”
“No,” Sacheri said. “And if you do, you haven’t told me.”
Jin closed their eyes.
Yes, unfair of me to bring up professional limitations and obligations. “There we are, then.”
“Can you wait until we get the investigation back and COR releases you from the advisory?”
COR and Oversight had each placed him under a recover-at-home order, which he’d mostly forgotten about. He didn’t know if they’d enforce it, or how. It didn’t matter, now.
“I’ve already lost cycles for the scan reports to come back. Once the investigation is done, what do I wait for next?”
Jin ignored that. “If the investigation closes, you won’t be at risk of interference accusations.”
“Interference into investigations about experiences I myself had,” Sacheri said. “And if Adda knew about this, COR might already know and be burying it.”
“Welcome to I&R,” Jin said wryly.
“Jin.”
“No.”
Sacheri bowed his head to hide tears. He could not make it clearer. He missed the synplants more than ever. Their sensory data would have helped him find a way through to them. He was so tired of talking, and waiting, and staring up into a sky where nothing changed.
“Sacheri,” Jin whispered. They were on their knees in front of him, now, taking his hands in theirs. “I am not trying to get in your way. I want to keep you safe. Adda cannot possibly be that. Can you please wait, if not for the investigation, then at least for Paradis?”
Sacheri leaned forward until all he could see were their eyes.
“I love you,” he said.
Sacheri lay awake, staring out the wide glass doors into the dark violet sky, counting stars as they spun lazy arcs across the night. Jin slept beside him, sprawled across the bed, sheets like ribbons around them, so beautiful it was hard to breathe. He gently eased Jin’s arm off from around his waist. Jin mumbled and rolled over, taking the rest of the covers and giving Sacheri space to slide out of the bed entirely.
Sacheri took his water from the bedside table to the kitchen, where he stood staring into the sink for a few moments, trying to steady his breath. He could not stay, and they could not go. He could not see any further conversation ending differently.
When his pulse quieted, he asked the house fai for silence. His long-unused drift bag was on its shelf in the work room, where Jin had put it after their return from Danae. Sacheri had repacked it a few cycles earlier, out of boredom. It felt strange in his hand, now. He set it by the front door, and then he returned to the bedroom doorway.
Jin was as he’d left them, all smooth skin and fine shapes, face soft with sleep. He thought about things he had promised, and acknowledged that he was choosing to break every one of them.
This was cowardly, but he could not stay.
He could not name the feeling in his chest, and for the first time he was grateful that his synplants were not active to do so for him.
He studied them for a long time, lingering on their face, and then he turned, and he left, and he made his way through the empty city streets until he reached the station-bound docks. He should leave some word, he knew, but Jin would trace anything he sent. They would find him, and he couldn’t risk it; he had to go forward. He turned off all of his indentifiers and comms access. He boarded the next shuttle out anonymously, and he did not think about what he had done.
Chapter 31
The two standard days to Bolis felt excruciatingly long, but at least he slept through the gates.
Once out of Semiz comms range, Sacheri sent a request for temp lodging on station through his I&R medallion, untraceable except by his superior, which, as an unassigned recruit, he did not yet have.
He did not run any requests through the shuttle comms, nor did he leave his seat to chat with other travelers. He did not think about Jin, but every time he lay down to sleep, he saw them asleep on the night he left, and he wept until exhaustion took him.
He threw himself into the archives search as soon as Bolis Station granted his access codes.
Sacheri set his implant to run anonymized searches through station comms, mindful of the pathways and strings that might alert monitors. And then he slept. He dreamed of violet streaks in a jet black sky, winds howling through scrub canyons, rockslides in the dark thundering across unsteady metal beams. He woke aching and exhausted, face down in a wet pillow, tears streaming, vision blurred with a violet tinge.
He had not removed his pendant. He had worn it since they’d exchanged gifts on their first Candlefest on Semiz, and he could not imagine taking it off, even now. He frequently caught himself holding it, his palm gently wrapped around it where it lay between his collarbones. He didn’t know when that had become a habit, but the comfort suggested it had been so for some time.
He let out a long, shuddering breath, and opened the display for another search.
Nine days after reaching Bolis Station, Sacheri sent a ping to Paradis that he was safe, in full control of his faculties, promising to tell her everything when he could. He did not open his comms for the response. He did not know how to respond to any of the obvious questions, and he didn’t trust himself to say nothing when asked.
Sacheri did not want to know—at least not yet—what had happened in his absence. He didn’t know which was worse: that someone might be looking, or that someone might not be. He tried hard to not think of anyone specifically, or about the night he left or about what might have happened after. He could not bear the thought of contacting Jin. He was a coward, and the way he left had been cruel. He knew as he did it how much it would hurt them, and he could not see any explanation that would deserve forgiveness. Maybe, if he found the answers, they would hear him out. Maybe someday he would be able to explain.
The sky was washed with violet, streaked with amber; he remembered it hazily from a dream, but this was not a dream, exactly; he knew where he was, and what he was doing. She was there, layered over him. Her usual frantic scramble of feelings and the aching need threaded through every contact was now calm and steady. He projected his own connection, as best he could.
She pointed away from the sky, back to the station outpost. He hesitated, but she moved away from him, certain he would follow.
Here, she said at the door. We’re the last.
The door did not open under his hand or at his voice.
Here, she repeated.
It’s destroyed, he said. We can’t. There’d been an explosion, and he’d been injured, but the outpost itself had not been destroyed, not completely. He could not access that memory, but he sensed it was there, beckoning.
Anguish flooded his ‘plants as he reached for the damaged piece. He gasped and withdrew.
It’s going to hurt, she said. There’s no other way. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please release us. Please.
Sacheri wept, but it felt to him like someone else, far away. His synplants burned, and he knew he could not stay here long and survive the fire in his nerves. Hopefully, fai had had enough time to pull what pieces he’d held and connect them—
They’ll come for you, she said.
Sacheri woke up in his room on Bolis Station, surrounded by dimmed displays. He rubbed the sleep from his hands and face and tried to focus through the faint amethyst haze over his eyes.
If he had been able to coordinate inquiry and analysis with fai, Sacheri might have found all he needed in the vast Bolisian archival system in a few days; on his own with standard ‘plants and the non-fai finding aids made available to visiting scholars, each inquiry required multiple revisions and refinements before the results were returned in any useful quantity and format. He lost sense of days passing, coming back to consciousness from time to time with the understanding that he’d not quite been himself.
Three full cycles since he’d left Semiz. One quarter of a standard year.
The longest they’d been apart since the first time they’d met.
Sacheri eased himself out of a lunge and onto the floor in the center of the room. He had kept himself occupied with strength and flexibility immersions; he needed to do something while the inquiry records sorted and filtered themselves into something he could follow. Exertion kept the intrusive memories at bay, or at least lessened their intensity. Sometimes.
In all that time he had spoken only to the station systems. He’d taken long walks through the station corridors, keeping his eyes down and his pace brisk enough to deter any friendly overtures, and all of his meals had been delivered by drone.
Perhaps the dead syn in his head was enough company.
The clip waiting for him on the main display was an interview with a merchant for an outfit that didn’t survive the Storms. Sacheri peered at the view, thinking his implant was playing tricks.
Behind the merchant, barely visible between the outline of her shoulder and the doorway of whatever building she was in, was an angry, shouting crowd with signs and banners. The distance and focus made it impossible to read them; Sacheri squinted at the display, trying to see around the sea of violet that swept his sight. One of the crowd stepped forward, and their sign readable for a few seconds. Sacheri stopped the record, moving it back and forth until the sign was in focus.
He shook his head as the violet tinge shimmered and cleared like smoke in the breeze, and read the sign again and again as he transferred a copy of the clip to his personal archive, carefully marked with as much metadata as he could take.
Under it a crudely drawn picture of an exploding moon flinging corpses across the stars, the sign said, BOLS WON’T DIE FOR COR SYNS.
He had no idea what it meant.
Synchronists had never worked on Bolis. He’d never seen anything to suggest otherwise; COR had respected Bolisian restrictions for modified humans and fai alike, out of fear that it would lose access to the last half-functioning gate back to the Inner Ring. Oversight was similarly at COR’s mercy. And yet, some set of Bolisian citizens had vehemently protested something connected to synchronists?
He checked the time stamps for capture and archival and access, and compared them to sets of data he’d carried from Semiz. The protest dated to between the earliest known terraforming project on Adda’s job list and the moons where he and Lumen had retrieved the damaged fai, which overlapped the era of Oversight’s destroyed records regarding the third gen. Sacheri tapped at the arms of his chair with his fingertips as he replayed the interview.
It hurt to imagine how Jin would have whispered to themself as they considered the most efficient keys, but he did it anyway. The satisfied look when the right results rolled up the display. The quiet victory cheer.
Sacheri dropped his pendant inside his shirt and focused on the display in front of him. He was making progress. He could not be distracted now.
The merchant appeared in a scattering of news clips. Sacheri called up the outfit’s transport logs and permit records, and found nothing connected to Bolis or Oversight, and nothing more than standard regulatory connections to COR. It nagged at him—there had to have been some reason for that merchant in particular to draw attention— but there was nothing more for him to build new inquiries on.
The protesters in the clips had been part of a radical splinter group—known as Dimmers—obsessed with the idea of synchronists coming for the unmodified; they’d never gained real traction on Bolis, and after a few cycles of noise making, they’d either faded back into their dirtside lives or left Bolis to continue the fight elsewhere. He found references to COR projects in their activities, but none of those projects matched anything he could connect to Oversight.
He was more certain than ever that the missing fai and the third generation synchronists and the dead moons were all connected, but the answer was not on Bolis. He adjusted some of the parameters to include more options for COR listings.
The alerts that he had set to ping him when Adda’s whereabouts were revealed had yet to alert him to anything. The next obvious step would be to return to a COR network and run a new set of inquiries in light of what he’d gathered on here.
He’d left Semiz against advice by both COR and Oversight. It was likely both groups were looking for him and considered him a risk to himself or others; any fai reviewing his case could have identified the debris as hybrid code. He could not use his I&R medallion without risking attention he did not want.
It amused him that he’d only bothered with the entire process in order to gain access to certain archives just to run off into the stars and void that access altogether.
“No better than I ever was,” he said to the empty room.
Jin’s I&R medallion would still work. Probably.
Sacheri turned back to the last set of inquiries. Maybe there was another approach. He recognized many but not all of the archive results; most were smaller non-COR worlds that looked to Bolis to bolster their standing in the greater political stages.
There was one specific COR archive listed: all COR transport records through Bolis Station, complete with all crew, staff, and passenger rosters. Human and fai alike.
The COR transport records were not as detailed as he’d hoped, but did reveal that the merchant he’d been tracking had hired COR transports for some of their terraforming projects; Sacheri confirmed that those operations preceded the policy shifts banning COR from commercial enterprises and set that data aside.
Several dozen entries into the search results, Sacheri found a notation: a COR transport under contract with a merch outfit had been delayed while investigating a distress call, and submitted an official request for COR aid to the moon in question.
It was one of the moons on Adda’s list.
He added inquiries for that system, along with any other requests for aid or records of alarms or distress calls.
He found nothing new relevant to the new moon, and the results for the distress call inquiry were overwhelming; he’d forgotten to set any limitations and, as a result, he was now looking at an extensive list of every distress call that had passed through Bolis Station’s comms networks since before the Storms.
Sacheri laughed at the foolishness of his error. “Jin would have caught that,” he said to the display. “Suggest filters for limiting most relevant results.”
That reduced the results to a much more manageable number. He scanned the summaries, unsurprised by how many were simple repair and rescue requests. “Is there an option to see which of these calls had responses? Or if they’ve been referenced during a defined period of time?”
Maybe he could find Adda that way.
A light hand landed on his arm as he turned away from the recycler, startling him into a quiet yelp.
“Sorry to startle you.” The round, smiling face—Kirsha, his standard ‘plant supplied, using masculine terminologies now, and again using a cane; he remembered Umair shepherding a pair of techs out of a post-run dinner, leaving him and Jin at the table.
